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"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Technically, we might replace the whole schema laid out in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (aka 'Historical Materialism') with an evergrowing extension of the process of formal subsumption, dating back to the invention of the money commodity in Ancient Mesopotamia and perhaps before (certainly by the time of coins in 7th century Athens). If we are to take Marx seriously: Since it is the form of Value that causes us to fetishise the products of our labours as innately "valuable", commodity fetishism must have already existed on a small scale as far back as that. However, of course this phenomenon only gains genuine significance when it is more or less universalised, in the era of capitalist production.

Looked at this way, we can disinherit the uncomfortably rigid categories derived from Adam Smith and Hegel (slave society, feudal society &c) in favour of something much more fluid and uneven.

In our present epoch - let's call it neoliberalism - the formal subsumption of our private lives continues at a rapid rate, I think it's accurate to identify this with Foucault's biopolitics. There is striking evidence of this in the newsmedia everyday and I think it's safe to say that it is an accelerating process. Formal subsumption now occurs at the level of the personal, the affective and the immaterial (think how most low-level service sector work involves the producing of emotions, making customers feel happy, desired, safe etc). For Foucault, biopolitics was about the continual drive of the State and capital to measure and record our lives in ever more stringent and intrusive ways. This short analysis nails it: www.newappsblog.com/2014/01/bi…

I don't mean to make the crude error that neoliberalism/our present era is fundamentally a break from the recent past, or capitalism altogether, just that the exponential acceleration of these trends is particularly noteworthy.

It is interesting to make a note of what the great classical economists would make of our society: Smith/Ricardo/Mill/Marx etc would judge only a small fraction of our annual material output "productive". (In Britain, this is currently a figure slightly below 20% - service sector and knowledge labour makes up about 78% of GDP). Automation keeps driving this down, as per the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (Marx).

I want to do another post about the counterpart to formal subsumption, called real subsumption, automation and possibly explain the role of money according to Marx's Capital and why the Labour Theory of Value is not what most modern economists think it is

Hey, I've been wondering about what kind of Communist you are. I heard you say that you were a Libertarian Marxist somewhere, but I was wondering what form of it that you specifically adhere to, or which philosopher or belief do you feel the closest to. (Like a Council Communist or Luxemburgist for example.)

Eh I kind of am, but I don't really buy into the industrial-era categories like "anarchist" and "state socialist" anymore. I would say that I am a Marxist, or at least a post-Marxist. I reject the centrality of working class struggle to changes in the capitalist system, though such struggle is still important: But necessary innovations in capitalism itself bring it closer to its own destruction, and no support for bourgeois parliamentary politics on the left or the right can fundamentally alter the direction of Capital's development.

Of course classic hero figures like Luxemburg, Karl Korsch and Trotsky etc have influenced me, but I'd say they are almost totally irrelevant to 21st century capitalist production. MY influences are people like the Frankfurt School, Moishe Postone, and autonomists like Antonio Negri. Check 'em out.Sorry for the complicated answer!